It’s the loud and constant bickering and juvenile name-calling that gets to me. A divided democracy can still work. That is the beauty of a liberal democracy. It’s the rude and caustic vitriol and the total lack of any decorum that is going to bring us down. Division is ideological. Character assassination is personal.
Eight months ago, a slight majority of Americans voted for change and put the Republicans back in power. Slightly less than half of Americans were unhappy, but even many of them agreed that change was necessary. The Democrats hadn’t delivered.
Neither, unfortunately, despite an irritating number of bombastic exclamations of self-congratulations, have the Republicans. The economy doesn’t feel any better. Companies continue to lay off employees. DOGE was a bust. Everything still costs too much. (According to Google AI, “The price of eggs in the US today is significantly higher than it was a year ago…”) We may or may not be on the verge of another never-ending foreign war. Only one-third of those deported to date are actual criminals and the methods we’re using to deport them are barbaric and not worthy of “the shining city upon a hill.”
What gives?
In early 2018, I published a book entitled, “We, Ourselves, and Us.” In it, I offered this prediction:
What will emerge, and has already emerged, whether blue or red, is a one-dimensional autocracy that will, by definition, alienate large blocks of the population in pursuit of solutions that no longer reflect the real problems at hand.
Why did I say that? Because our economy and our system of governance are operating completely out of context with current reality. The ideology, mind you, is still sound. The American experiment, as Alexis de Tocqueville called it in 1835, remains full of promise and resiliency. It is the why for which we are applying that ideology that simply has not kept pace.
In 1776 there were 2.5 million people in the original thirteen colonies, about the population of San Antonio today. The concept of GDP didn’t exist at the time, but economists estimate that the annual GDP per capita, for British colonists at least, was about $67 in 1840 prices, the year the estimate was made. Today, by contrast, the 340 million residents of the US generate about $28 trillion in annual GDP, or $82 million per capita.
With relatively few major modifications along the way, however, our system of political governance has not changed at all. We still have a president elected by the Electoral College, a US Senate with two representatives from each state regardless of population, and a US House of Representatives with proportional representation, but heavily gerrymandered. And that whole apparatus is mirrored at the state level in all 50 states.
Economically, we moved from an agrarian to an industrial and now a digital economy, but it’s still based on traditional capitalist ideology developed centuries ago. The only change, but it’s a critical one, is that there has been a relentless division of labor enabled by the industrial revolution and furthered by the digital revolution.
The division of labor is a good thing, as Adam Smith predicted it would be. Fragmenting the value creation process into more narrowly defined bands of responsibility ushered in a golden period of productivity improvement that constantly reduced costs and improved the quality of life just as the fragmentation of our communication has greatly reduced the cost of communication while expanding our entertainment, communication, and educational options.
There has, however, been unintended consequences. The division of labor, as Adam Smith predicted it would, has greatly increased inequality in the distribution of wealth and income. As has the division of communication, creating a society where the ‘haves’ have never had more, while the ‘have nots’, well, have nothing.
The reason is that this inequality has resulted in growing inequality in the distribution of power because the division of labor requires a hierarchy of authority to function. And those In authority, naturally, use that authority to enhance their share of the spoils and otherwise rig the game in their favor.
There has, however, been no commensurate change in the distribution of obligation. Those in authority have captured the spoils but left the obligation to feed, house, and clothe the population behind, creating a huge disconnect between opportunity and obligation that leaves the bottom half of the hierarchy, the working class, frustrated and powerless.
The moral and ethical justification for this disconnect is fairly simple.
The core of the American experiment, from 1776 to today, has been the singular notion of “I.” Individual freedoms. Individual opportunity. Individual property. The individual right to own a gun, to assemble, and to speak your mind. Me, myself, and I.
And that was workable when we were a relatively poor country of 2.5 million farmers and families were tightknit and took care of each other. That won’t work, however, and the proof is in the pudding, in the large, wealthy, and economically advanced country we are today. That won’t work when there is an inequality in the distribution of power on the scale we have today. While the economic pie, in theory at least, can expand uniformly, power is a zero-sum game. Those who acquire power do so at the expense of everyone else, an everyone else they almost never see or otherwise interact with on a daily basis.
Obligation, however, by which I mean obligation to family, community, and society at large, has not concentrated in the way that wealth and power have. Every American still carries nearly full responsibility for his or her family, community, and society at large. Instead of transferring some of that obligation to those who have gained power and wealth through the division of labor and communication, we are, in fact, moving in the opposite direction. The Big Beautiful Bill now passed by Congress is a monument to “me, myself, and I.” The wealthy get more money and tax cuts and the meager relief in obligation that working Americans have been granted in the past will be stripped away. As a result, wealth and power will become even more concentrated while personal obligation will be further dispersed, aggravating the disconnect between power and obligation.
There is only one way to redistribute obligation in the same way that the industrial and digital revolutions redistributed wealth and power. We must replace me, myself, and I, with we, ourselves, and us.
Ideologically, it’s not a big change. We can keep our capitalism and our democracy. We simply need to redefine the obligations of those institutions at the heart of those ideologies. We don’t need to change the how. We just need to change the why.
That means a new federal law that makes corporations responsible to all their constituencies, not just shareholders and senior executives. Simple legislation would take the money out of politics. And a 29thAmendment could make it clear that politicians at all levels are obligated to all citizens, not just their base.
There are other simple changes that I think would also help. A longer presidential cycle, limited to one term, and strict term limits for Congress would take a lot of the churn out of our politics and allow our politicians to spend more time governing and less time campaigning and raising money. It would also take the politics out of presidential decision-making and allow him, and hopefully her, to make decisions that are clearly in the best long-term interests of the country.
There is no alternative. A me-first economy of the size and complexity of the United States is destined to be dominated by the lucky few at the top who cannot resist the temptation to stack the economy and the political process in their favor. A me-first political system, given the size and complexity of the population it now needs to govern, inevitably rewards those who seek power without obligation.
It is now abundantly evident that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have a solution. They are simply marching us toward a time when it all gets burned to the ground. Autocracy will only delay the inevitable. Peace has never been maintained by turning the sword internally. There aren’t enough police and military to subdue a citizenry that no longer has anything to lose.
Socialism? The haves will shout that accusation from the rooftops. But it’s not. I call it We-ism, the simple recognition that we’re all in it together whether we like it or not. We can restore our democracy and our capitalism, not by tearing them down or replacing them, but by putting them on a stronger footing that addresses the distribution of obligation in a way that mirrors the distribution of wealth and power.
To learn more please purchase my book, We, Ourselves, and Us. It’s available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle versions. Click on the title to go directly there. And thank you.
photo credit: shutterstock.com/ Mr. Music